


Feng

by OneTrueStudent



Series: The Gloaming [9]
Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-13
Updated: 2017-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-03 23:30:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10261472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OneTrueStudent/pseuds/OneTrueStudent
Summary: Prologue. I want to try another three act.





	

One of the most important adult skills is winning with grace. One has to do these things with restraint. I hired a mariachi band to sing praise of my victory outside the Surrogate's window at dawn. Then I sent him three goblin cakes to congratulate him for having the foresight to hire me, and finally, when I was presented victorious to Her Majesty, I winked.

Elves don't wink, but he understood.

There wasn't a whole lot he could do in return. The classic snub elves give humans is excusing themselves because they caught the vapors from our smell. Ignoring for a moment whether or not humans do smell to sensitive elvish noses, Her Majesty had a surrogate to deal with humans explicitly because she was too genteel. His job was dealing with my smell. Prince Aehr was making good his promise to sing my praises, which I felt deeply conflicted over, so he clearly didn't mind the human odor, and if a prince could tolerate me, the Surrogate had no excuse. 

More importantly to the elvish circles Prince Aehr had introduced Othrak the goblin as a friend of the elvish people and holder of a great debt. The other elves of Bloodharvest affirmed this unilaterally, many with stories of the goblin's heroism. The Solange was losing its mind. All I had done was wink.

Yeah, and, but let's not quibble.

Prince Aehr submitted a kind request for my presence in his office, and I put on my most innocent face. This was two days after we returned and I hadn't intended to see him again so soon. I was still accoutred only in my work clothes and wanted something nice. 

I dress to defeat watchers. My cloak is two-tone reversible, forest green and rocky gray, and my boots have three different leathers, stitched together so the outlines of my feet are lost in the outlines of fur and scale. My pants hang asymmetrically from the waist, belted here and there so they don't follow the shape of my legs. There's a line like a demarcated sea across my tunic over the breast which makes my shadow look divided. The total effect is incredible for stealth; in anything but perfect light my outline is mashed with fake shadows and silhouettes. Many people have looked right at me and not seen a woman there. 

Not seeing a woman is the point, but I was about to meet Prince Aehr, presumably alone, in his office. The problem with dressing like a pile of dead leaves is you look like a pile of dead leaves.

Whatever. I was being silly. He hadn't minded when I saved him and his comrades from Bloodharvest. 

Prince Aehr's office was in the lower east wing of the incestous royal palace of the Solange, a mixing of many lesser palaces that invaded each other and occasionally slipped a tip of corridor through their neighbor's stables. Her Majesty's Solange, Elvenhome, was circumscribed by but somewhat independent of the kingdom of the Languid Forest, save that the palaces were intertwined. To the south of the Languid stretched the simple forests of Dair Ma'Trieasette ol Vir Mas'De, a hegemony of fourteen kingdoms (last I checked) which have independent capitals but their monarchs live in the Solange. To the north was the deep tree ocean of the Arsae, where the treetops are white crested and the clouds break against them, where the ground is so deep no human has seen or been told of dirt under which is not more trees. In Bloodharvest we came close, but that was across the Arsae to the north where the archipelago of Goblinmounts poke up through the foam of Thyf. I don't know if Bloodharvest still stood. I hoped it didn't.

"Welcome, Astrolagamage Elegy," said Aehr when I arrived, and he took me back to his private quarters. There was not only a chair back here but a bench. Two beings could, conceivably, sit together. What manner of forwardness was this?

Prince Aehr of the Solange sat alone, resting sideways against the trelasse of the chair back. His body climbed it at the angle of ivy. His clothing wrapped him tightly. Aehr wore a green felt they spun from whitepuffs, an arboreal cotton that takes no dye. His was long in the sleeves and legs, and interfaced with his boots at a point of such complexity I didn't know where each began or ended. He'd been shaved in Bloodharvest, something the goblins do to hurt their prisoner's pride, so now he had a soft stubble like peach fuzz over his skull. Right now his eyes were brown and green. He smiled and indicated I should sit on the bench facing him. 

"Your Highness," I replied. It let me skip his basket of titles.

A hint of amusement cast a shadow of a smile on his lips. "Thank you for coming. I'd like to discuss something of great personal import," he said in Celephian formal.

Several wildly improbable guesses ran through my head. "Yes?" I prompted in the same language.

"I'd like to talk to you about wolves."

I looked at him for a few seconds. He waited. Elves don't have uncomfortable silences. They have silences, but they aren't uncomfortable. Elves think nothing of collecting their thoughts for thirty or forty years mid conversation. Me blinking at him pushed no boundaries.

"Wolves," I said, firmly wrapping my head around that. 

"Wolves," he agreed. He smiled again. "They're missing from the Solange and Languid."

"Right. Wolves. No wolves. Got you. What are those wolves doing?" I asked. 

"I don't know. I would like you to bring them back."

I sighed to recalibrate my thoughts and realized I had been leaning forward on the bench, my elbows digging into the hard iron buckles of my knee belts. I stuff grass and twigs in there when I'm working. Sitting back and flattening my face with my hands, I pushed my hair back and stretched my eyes. Wolves. Right. "Why?"

"Because they're apex predators!" replied Aehr passionately, and he pulled charts from the wall.

Prince Aehr had done the math. He started off with a pentalogy of population models based on starting wolf populations mapping a neutral case, high and low populations, and catastrophic high and low populations. "You can see that the low population case initially results in increased verna, but wolf numbers rebuild fast with an increased food supply. Below a critical point, the catastrophically low population case destroys the forest as rodentia breed unlimitedly. They cause systemic cascading crashes of seed numbers while deer strip the bark off the trees, killing the forests. We observed this during the mange-plague of the year of white-moon. The number of wolves in the wild decreased by nearly ninety percent. Within a year and a half, rats were consuming entire farms. Less than three hundred years later, when the stomach worm infestation swept through, you saw the same thing."

"The catastrophic high population case is just as bad, because then the wolves start eating herd animals and eventually will start eating elves and people, but I only included that for completeness," said Aehr. He beamed. "It's a sign change."

I looked at him. Aehr had no idea I was here. He was wrapped in his world, speaking rapidly and unelvishly about pressures. Sometimes he shot little side glances at me, grinning, before plunging back into interactive effects of moles and wheat. Those were brief moments on the surface of his work before he plunged back down, and swam among the tall algae of biology. His eyes glinted with passions unlike the slow elvish smolder. He hadn't banked the fires, nor put up screens to keep the heat from me, called to the fireplace.

I let him talk and lost sight of the individual words, wrapping the feeling and flow of them. It was soft, warm, and oh so strange. I put my chin on my hand and stared at him. 

"-Which brings us back to why you need to go and bring back the wolves!" he finished, excitedly.

"Okay," I said. I smiled at him. "Where are they?"

"I don't know. You'd have to pick up the trail at the goblinmounts."

I was still sitting with my chin on my hands as I began to laugh. First I chuckled softly and built to a strong guffaw in harder and harder gasps of choking breath until I cried and brayed like a horse. Near-maniacal hysteria ripped out of me. I cackled like a madwoman. Aehr had a silver pointer in his hands he lowered awkwardly as I threw my head back and gasped in pained fury. I kept laughing, right in his face.

Elves don't notice long silences, but he sure noticed that, and leaned back, away from me. I didn't care.

When the mania expired and I finished, tears leaking out of my eyes, I wiped my face and said, firmly, "No, thank you."

"Do you not want to do it?" he asked, uncomfortably.

"No, no thank you. I'm fine not returning to the goblins." I cough-chuckled a few times, my chest hurting and my throat raw. 

"Why not? Because of Bloodharvest?"

"Yeah, because of Bloodharvest," I replied, beaming at him. I stood up.

"That was somewhat unpleasant," he admitted. 

"I couldn't even get there," I said to take the sting out, because I felt bad. I started walking towards the door. 

"But you have the Artificer's ship!" begged Aehr.

"Gave it to Phillius in exchange for him sailing us back from Bloodharvest. I'm no sailor, and I'd need to hire him again." I shrugged. "I don't want to do that. He frightens me."

"I would pay you, of course," said Aehr.

"It would be very expensive, and honestly, I just don't want to. I went recently. You were there. Lovely office. Thank you for having me." I was almost outside. 

The Prince hemmed. "So you would go."

"No, no I won't," I said, hand on door. The door opened. I saw blessed freedom. 

"You did, but you said it would be very expensive."

"Oh. Well, yes, but I don't want to. It's a terrible place. It would be more expensive than it's worth."

"How expensive?" asked the elvish prince.

"Very. I'm telling you, I don't want to go!" I exclaimed. "The price is more money than it's worth!"

"Yes, yes, I understand. But for scientific curiosity, how expensive?"

"Look, Aehr, I don't what to be hostile but you're not listening-"

"Yes, Astrolagamage Elegy, yes. I understand. But hypothetically, how expensive?"

I sighed angrily at him. "Your Majesty Prince Aehr-" I bit through titles.

Prince Aehr named a figure, and my mouth went dry. I muttered a few things in human that address the kinds of violent reproduction elvish languages don't have verbiage to be translated into.

"I'm not sure I know what you mean," he said, "But suppose we just double it." He raised his eyebrows excitedly. "Would you go to Malice for that?"

I stared at him until I got uncomfortable in the silence. I finally asked, "Is that a real number?"

"Come with me. We'll talk to the accountants." 

The accountants were straightforward about it. Aehr had that kind of money in what the Celephians call liquid assets. It was stupid money. The math to get to that kind of money got so complicated it collapsed under its own weight, and I felt like a small child, staring at a cookie jar on the top shelf from a pile of broken chairs and upset cushions. Aehr promised he would get me a cookie. 

"You'll do it?" he asked, still smiling like he was both excited and trying to be helpful. "You'll find my wolves?"

"Sure," I said. I tried to lick my lips, but my tongue had no saliva. "The goblinmounts. Wolves. Money. Sure." I smiled, and I felt like a maniac. "No problem."

 

So it was I returned to the Arsae and hired Phillius, both mad and had sailed with Helen. I spent a lot of that walk talking to myself. Phillius had knowledge I was coming and met me on a broad wooden pier beside the beams of two great sae, deep rooted trees whose lower branches parted the thyf as they rose. Sometimes a high wind shook the tips of the trees, and patches of the deep green below shook. It was a game to figure out which shakings, be they miles away, were the sae I stood on, a game of rhythms and pattern. Phillius didn't play. He waited on a branch with his long-fingered hands on his too-thin knees, and watched me with his deep-set eyes. Thyf had gotten into his eyebrows, and it grew in green among his hairs.

"Elegy," he said as I hiked up the foliage towards him.

"Captain Phillius," I replied. I suddenly missed the elaborate elvish greetings I normally avoided. "I would like to hire your services. I need passage."

"To?"

"Goblindom."

"Delightful," he replied, and he stretched his cheeks into a smile.

Phillius had an unelvish number of teeth. I'd counted. I got the usual number, but I felt like there were a few dozen hiding in his mouth that I had missed.

"Good. Good." I smiled back, and my face hurt.

His eyebrows were thick and green, living with the intensity of the deep Arsae. With no choice I followed him down a long path to his ship. The path was a rope strung from tree to tree with another beside it for grip. Winds under the canopy played with the tall sae. Phillius climbed quickly when the rope danced and lingered when it was still.

The last time I had seen his ship it was named the Dream in Emerald, but he would have rechristened it to make it his own. I asked, and he said, "Rue." 

God help me, at least Phillius was quick and to the point.


End file.
